


no more to defend, but someone to love

by kimaracretak



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings (Movies)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Post-War of the Ring, a lil bit of that creeping ominous dread i can't seem to totally remove from anything i write, ambiguous relationships and the homes you find there, cities that want to eat you, gondor has no king gondor needs no king gondor will eat your king if you're not careful, loss and the weight of the love it brings, polyamory in varying combinations, to rebuild and the re-collapse, vague animosities and vaguer (but more lasting) friendships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-16 08:33:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8095249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/pseuds/kimaracretak
Summary: (why / why don't you try / why don't you stay with me? / time is over): It is not so bad, to start. The city is wary of her, and she of it, but between them stands Faramir, one hand in hers and one on its walls, and with him there is some kind of peace. He is not proud enough to claim the city, and this Éowyn respects: none among the Rohirrim could lay claim to the grasslands, the horses, the tents and expect to hold on to that ownership. But Gondor knew Faramir first and best, she sees how he watches Aragorn — outsider, his eyes say, while his mouth says brother — and Éowyn feels the sharp edge of the knife they're balanced on more keenly, she thinks, than do either of the men.Or; the constellations of relationships in post-war Gondor are shaped by much more than just history





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Eternal Scribe (Shadowcat)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadowcat/gifts).



> Title from Kamelot, '[The Hunter's Season](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXGZSXlhhwI)', summary quote from Lacuna Coil, '[Claustrophobia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9PmoR_q5Z8)'.
> 
> I haven't written something so far from my own LOTR headcanon in a very long time -- possibly ever? -- and I do hope I didn't wander too off-prompt for you! It was a challenge and a delight.
> 
> Nosekisses to [Catherine](http://archiveofourown.org/users/catherinelefey) for not yet getting tired of beta-ing by saying 'your ending is badly paced' on every single fic of mine she reads

_crossed the borderline, found something i'd never adjust to;_

In the end, it is harder to leave Rohan than Éowyn ever could have imagined. She had often dreamed of riding to the end of the grasslands and beyond, of finding the line where sky met land and letting it slice through her, leaving her multiple and _free_.

Idle, wind-tossed fancies. She knows now that she can never truly leave Rohan, her veins are too open to the sky, her mind laid bare to the whispers of the grass.

But Éowyn wants a future, and there is no future for her in Rohan. In Rohan she is caught in the unstoppable present between sky and land, safe and whole but bound and preserved with nowhere to ride but in circles. She is frozen, waiting. Something is always coming, over the hills and up from the river. In the grasslands where time is slippery, Rohan keeps them all still, keeps them all safe.

Éowyn wishes, after the war, to keep her own safety.

( _After._  Can it really be after? Everything she knows tells her the peace is not long to last, but everyone she knows has welcomed the peace as true. So she works for it, day by day.)

Faramir has kind eyes that smile at her and strong hands that calm her when she wakes screaming from nightmares of being pinned to the ground in Pelennor Fields with a thousand black swords. Faramir has a quick mind to match hers over mead by the fire and solid, steady plans to rebuild his city.

Faramir has a future, and when he offers to let her share it with him, she accepts with only the briefest of hesitations. His blood is still hot from the war, as is hers, and so too like hers has his been tempered by it. He reaches a long-forgotten part of her heart, and offers as much of his own as he can in return, and it is . . . _enough_.

The war is over, Éowyn tells herself. The war is over and we are healing.

It is enough.

(It is a lie.)

Her brother is in Minas Tirith to see her wed — outside, yes, and the city's walls out of sight, but still she feels their presence — and everything but his presence at her side seems _wrong_.

She wants the life that this marriage should be the start of more than anything. She isn't at all sure she wants the life that it _is_  beginning.

Eomer leaves her with a kiss and a horse, and she does not say, _stay._  She could never ask that of any of the Rohirrim.

 _Come back, sister_ , he whispers into her hair. _Come back yourself._

Éowyn's nails dig crescent moons into the leather covering his back, and under his familiar scent of grass and horses, she can smell his own fear.

She does not make a promise she cannot keep. She says instead, _I will find you._

 

 

**

 

 

_a rush through rusted veins;_

It is not so bad, to start. The city is wary of her, and she of it, but between them stands Faramir, one hand in hers and one on its walls, and with him there is some kind of peace. He is not proud enough to claim the city, and this Éowyn respects: none among the Rohirrim could lay claim to the grasslands, the horses, the tents and expect to hold on to that ownership. But Gondor knew Faramir first and best, she sees how he watches Aragorn — _outsider_ , his eyes say, while his mouth says _brother_ — and Éowyn feels the sharp edge of the knife they're balanced on more keenly, she thinks, than do either of the men.

She loses her words amidst the walls here. They swallow them whole and never once think to tell her why, or how, or what they do with the words. What songs they make while men and elves sleep.

It is, perhaps, better not to know.

The summer sun still burns but it cleanses nothing. In the dips and valleys where the city's bones cast shadows, something still watches. Éowyn can feel their eyes, but she sees nothing: not them, not any other sign of their presence. In the fields, there was always something: the shift of the wind as it wrapped around a hunter's body, grass that refused to be moved back into place after it had been disturbed.

But the silence that falls on Gondor when night slips into pre-sun morning and rebuilding has ceased is oppressive, obscuring. It is black darker than moonless nights in Rohan, and it chills her. Yet it draws her forward, and she has no choice but to comply, treading paths that are slowly, inexorably etched into her bones.

 _You feel it too_ , Arwen says in the brief moments when they pass each other on the city's stairs during sleepless nights. But for all her bravado, for all her place as Queen, it is a question. When Éowyn says, _yes,_  the relief that passes over Arwen's face makes her almost unrecognisable.

Éowyn is loved. In the end she will look back on that as the worst of all the things she bore in Minas Tirith: she is loved, and she loves, and she is suffocated with it as surely as she was by the wind, and yet here it seems less kind.

She sleeps uneasy by Faramir's side, writhing in the grips of dreams, pinned by the glares of absent eyes. He does not understand, for all that he holds her and whispers words of love ( _I love you_ ÉowynÉowyn _I love you_ Éowyn _,_  her name prayer and promise all at once). Faramir has room in his heart for her and for his realm. Gondor has no such space.

In Arwen she finds a sister: displaced and quiet. Arwen is unlike anyone she has ever met, so many lifetimes, so many stories wrapped in such a small body. Arwen tells her stories beside fires that she feeds with wrong-textured grasses, gifts her with wine that Éowyn supposes must taste exactly like the air in the elven lands.

The air where it is free.

Faramir spends many of these nights with them, and one winter night while she lies half-asleep in bed and watches them from across the room, their quiet murmurs wrapping her in the closest thing she has felt to safety in months, she thinks that this is the life she wanted: her work, her husband, her friend. But in Minas Tirith, it is a different life entirely.

There is a space in her chest that aches, but for all that Éowyn knows her own mind, she cannot begin to understand how to fix her heart.

 _Let us leave,_  she finally begs Faramir.

This too he grants her, but their departure for Ithilien is no easier than her leavetaking from Rohan. She never thought she would be one to run, but she would face a thousand and one more wars on Pelennor Fields before she could stand to face another day here.

 

 

**

 

 

_incinerating hands that touched your graceful face;_

The city wears on Aragorn. He hides it well, but Arwen has known him since he was a child, and she _knows._  Gondor bids neither of them welcome, but she has learned patience in her lifetime and recognises a deeper patience still in her new city. Her husband knows no such thing, and though his belief in their future carried her through the war, she finds it tiresome now. She could have built a life for them in Arnor, had he not chosen to win her heart by charming her father instead of her.

Now, as she helps rebuild the city's walls, she cannot help but wonder whether she is keeping something out, or herself locked in. But there is nothing else for her to do.

Aragorn is kind to his people, and they to him, but there is little place for for an elf — even one who is their queen — in the circles he moves in. The people's goodwill towards her shades too quickly into distrust.

 _Please come back_ , she does not write to Éowyn and Faramir, who made the first months of her stay bearable.

 _Let us leave_ , she does not ask Aragorn, who is determined to honour the kingship he has won.

She and Faramir had talked once about the sea that claimed their mothers and refused to claim them. Still she would like to see it, and as the year turns Arwen watches Aragorn pace his chambers and thinks it would be good to remind him that he is man first, and king second.

( _My father never —_ she thinks — _And Faramir never_ —

It is why, she supposes, her husband is the only one to be crowned. She sits by the fire alone and wonders if she resents the crown or its lack more.)

When Éowyn writes to say she has borne a daughter, Arwen makes preparations to ride to her immediately. Aragorn watches, his face shadowed. _Come with me_ , she pleads. _You were a ranger once. You have spent too long within these walls. Gondor —_

 _Gondor needs me here_ , he says, and his voice is unrecognisable.

I need you, she does not say. Faramir and Eowyn need you. She does not beg. She has had too much practice letting him go, trusting in everything that made _them_ , that made them inevitable. She kisses him, claims him and —

— and still when Arwen crosses the Anduin her tears mingle with the river's waters because she is not sure this time that she has done _enough._

She stumbles when she dismounts in Emyn Arnen, and Faramir is there to catch her, calloused hands warm through her rough riding clothes and it is only as the pain of their separation lifts that she beings to understand how much she has missed this.

 _She is waiting for you,_  he says, and suddenly it is this that feels unstoppable, the weight of Faramir's words all out of proportion. _We missed you._

 _And I you._  She welcomes his hug, rests her head on his shoulder as Éowyn's voice drifts out to them, caught in a song along with her daughter's.

It is not home, they are still three where they should be four. Yet it feels like progress.

 

 

**

 

 

_sunk into the horizon;_

His brother's loss, Faramir thinks, could perhaps have been borne were it not so unremarkable in the great tally of Gondor's war: not the first, not the last, just another death, and many more lives shattered. It seems impossible, sometimes, that he is truly dead and gone, not just temporarily abandoned in the chaos of war.

 _Maybe today Boromir will come riding home,_ he catches himself thinking, frozen in the horizon's smile. _Maybe today he will be found in the rubble, half-starved and waiting for our healing hands._

Life in Emyn Arnen would ever be easier had he handed Minas Tirith to his brother instead.

Still it goes on, and with Morwen's birth and Arwen's arrival, the house starts to feel more alive. Vibrant, like it's a home that may yet stand against all that hides in this distrusted peace.

Arwen too watches the horizon, more expectant than longing. He has not the heart to tell her that he has much less faith in her husband, his king.

 _I wanted to call him brother,_  he confesses to her one night on the roof, as she dangles her feet over the edge of the parapat. They have said their goodnights to Morwen, Eowyn will join them soon with blankets and wine and cheese. It feels like old nights in Minas Tirith. Better.

 _I had hoped..._ Arwen sighs. _He is a good king, please do not doubt that. But he was a Ranger first, and sometimes I fear..._

She doesn't finish her sentence. She doesn't have to. Faramir knows what it means to belong to city and wilderness both, to captain a guard and to return home and be cradled by the stones. He knows that Aragorn, in his heart, is for the wild and Arwen and very little else.

 _Quiet tonight,_  Éowyn murmurs as she shuts the door behind her as quietly as she can with her arms full. She means more than just the two of them, Faramir knows. Tonight's silence feels heavy with the loss of all the things they have sacrificed to be here together.

He watches Éowyn help Arwen off the edge of the tower. They are all more careful in peace than in war.

Dinner passes under the moon's watchful eye, and it is not long before Faramir finds himself drawn down to the blankets between the women. Whole. _Almost._  With this alone he would be content, but Aragorn's absence is a persistent presence in Arwen's eyes, and he grows more uncertain by the day that it was right to leave him alone.

For all the dreams they have given to this land, they have received this in return, and still it is not enough. Still they stand on rebuilt peaks and wait for a collapse whose presence they have not yet learned to disbelieve.

Éowyn kisses him softly, reaches over his body to trace swirls across Arwen's bare stomach. _We will find him again,_  she promises, and Arwen makes a small hungry noise against her mouth that tugs low and hot in his belly.

 _We will find him_ , Faramir continues, burying his nose in Arwen's hair and reaching blindly for the laces of Éowyn's bodice. _And you will claim him again._

When Arwen ends up between their bodies, she is brighter than the sun, brighter than time. They are all three so, so bright, and absence brighter still.

 

 

**

 

 

_look for the remains of the everlasting me;_

There are ghosts in the stones of Minas Tirith and they no longer have names but those the child-Stewards racing up and down the halls have given them over centuries and they no longer have faces but those half-glimpsed and gone quicker than a hunted deer.

It is easy, by day. Gondor unfurls again under the light as she was always meant to, and Aragorn sits at her head: to lead, after she has been so long kept. There is life, again. These children will no more know war, and those soon to be born will never know what it means to fall.

Night, and the wild pulls at his heart, and Aragorn tumbles forward only to dash himself against walls that are never this close under the sun. He sits under the newly-flowering tree in the courtyard and remembers a time when Arwen would have pulled the fallen petals from his hair.

The ghosts say, _you are ours now. You will stay, if we permit._

His time here has always felt borrowed. Perhaps he is paying already. He grows thinner, despite the servants' best efforts to keep him fed. But the city's hunger will not be fed by something so simple.

Arwen returns with Éowyn. With Faramir. Returns hazy-dark around the edges with the same determination that he remembers from their time before Gondor. The same determination he fell in love with.

Her hands are warm when she cradles his face, and it is only then that he thinks the city must have been so much colder while she was gone. _Husband,_  she says. _You look unwell._

Behind her, Faramir and Éowyn stand hand in hand. Faramir's eyes are shadowed, Éowyn's body too tense. This is so far from the life he wanted to give them.

 _The crown means little to Gondor,_  Faramir says, and there is a warning and a sadness in his tone that Aragorn has long since grown unaccustomed to. _You are letting it mean far too much to you, my brother. The city knows. And it wants._

 _You would have me give up the crown?_ Here, with Arwen in his arms, it does not seem like such an impossible task. He remembers the walls, and their stolen words: _if we permit._  If he is to be cast aside, how then will he learn to be caught by these, his friends who he has so long kept away?

Éowyn steps forward, her free hand reaching for Arwen's. _Not forever. Not really. But learn what it means to belong to Gondor. To belong with us, first and instead._

Faramir too takes his hand, and his grasp is like nothing he has ever felt. It's electric, the shock of Minas Tirith's hold breaking from his mind and yet closing around Faramir's wrist in a ghostly echo of Aragorn's own fingers. _Gondor needs no king_ , Boromir had said. The moments where Gondor considered having a king, he realises in this moment, have passed, and he has been found wanting for all that would have made him suitable.

He says, _yes_ , and in their eyes he is not lacking.

And they persist.

Above the ground and under it, the city that will never let them leave each other bids them, _persist._

**Author's Note:**

> section titles;  
> (i) Katatonia, 'Leaders'  
> (ii) Katatonia, 'Rusted'  
> (iii) Epica, 'Edge of the Blade'  
> (iv) Lacuna Coil, 'Broken Things'  
> (v) Epica, 'Edge of the Blade'


End file.
